July 17, 2006

Putin wonders how we won the Cold War

This has been mentioned everywhere already, but since I posted a series of dumb quotes by public figures last week, I would be remiss if I left out the champion:

During a joint news conference Saturday in St. Petersburg, Bush said he raised concerns about democracy in Russia during a frank discussion with the Russian leader.

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said.

To that, Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

I used to imagine, when Bush talks about how well things are going in Iraq, that he's just lying. But it's clear that he really thinks democracy is flourishing in Iraq.

Actually, there is also a lot to be said for having Congress always controlled by whichever party is not in power. Even with my massive distrust of Republicans, I would ordinarily prefer this over the Democrats having controll of Congress and the Presidency. I think for the immediate situation we probably have one of the exceptions, but I am fond of the idea of the excesses of all sides being controlled as much as possible. (Naturally, I am writing theoretically. As Yogi Berra once uttered: in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't.)

Nice cluelessness... The sad thing is, I'm not at all surprised. As for impeachment, we've had an ironclad open-and-shut case for that since '03, all it takes is a reality-based Congress. We'll probably have to settle for shipping Bush, Cheney's corpse, and Rumsfeld to The Hague sometime next decade instead.

Mason: I completely agree, too bad there's no workable way to set that up. We'd basically have to redefine the Electoral College to equal the House minority caucus. I'm picking House rather than Senate because the minority party actually has some power in the Senate thanks to the filibuster, while House Democrats may as well stay home for all the power they have.

Though the immediate situation is definitely an exception. Words cannot express how I yearn to hear the shrieks of outrage from wingnuts forced to endure eight years of a hardcore liberal presidency, rubber stamped by a compliant Democratic Congress, putting at least two liberal extremist judges on the Supreme Court... Sadly, even if Democrats do get the trifecta in '08 they're still not going to have the guts or ruthlessness to inflict full measure of payback.

And the thought of Ann Coulter screaming and maybe throwing herself off a cliff (why didn't she take advantage of all those lovely gorges as an undergrad? I heard it was the hip thing to do.) from a sort of hangover resulting from Democratic rule just warms my heart...